Using Service Quality to Gain Competitive Advantage Essay

The customer service personnel should be in a position to acknowledge their clients and pay attention well to whatever they say and put into practice active listening. They should also give a chance to the customers to respond to the services the company offers perhaps through the enterprise’s website. For any company to prosper, good customer relation is paramount in building a loyal

Customer service involves a consideration of what is needed to treat the customers in a desirable

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation. Good customer service is

Customer service must satisfy the needs of the customers to ensure a service companies’ quality is maintained.

Understanding and listening attentively to the customer is important to the success of a business.

There are a number of ways a business can gain a competitive edge: excellent service, top of the range products, professional sales techniques and efficient and effective marketing strategies can contribute to the business and make us a market leader. Listening to our customers and acting on feedback can not only keep our loyal customers but encourage new customers. Having a recipe that incorporates all the above is a simple but effective method.

Assurance: Ensuring our customer have trust in our knowledge and confidence in our ability to deliver

Today’s customers are more aware and empowered, and have more bargaining power due to the exponential increase in competition – direct, indirect or substitute. In retailing, they want hassle-free shopping, have less time at their disposal to locate the shop and the merchandise and are reluctant to keep waiting. The modern format retail stores are doing their best to anticipate the customer’s demands and are going all out to redesign their store interiors, offer more choices in varieties and assortments, and are giving as many services as feasible.

Customer loyalty is much harder to obtain that customer service satisfaction. The most important first step is to satisfy the customer by meeting their expectations. Customers only give a company one chance and if they aren’t satisfied they will not do business with that company again, as well as tell others of their experience. The next step would be to exceed the customer’s expectations. If a business goes above and beyond to assist the customer they begin to build loyalty. The next step is to truly surprise the customer. In order to dominate the marketplace the company must find a way to make them selves stand out with their product or service, accompanied with phenomenal customer service. Once this has been done customer satisfaction and loyalty will be gained. “Acquiring a new customer can cost four or five times more than keeping a current customer” (Bestmark, 2013). So it’s essential to keep the current customer’s happy and coming back for more.

Customer satisfaction and service quality are the two important components that direct anyone’s attention in every concept related to marketing, services, etc. (Spreng and Mackoy, 2006). In today’s competitive era, the success lies in

Traditionally, Service quality can be portrayed as the result from client comparison between their assumptions about the service they will use and their insight about the service company. That implies that if the insight recognitions would be higher than the desired the service will be considered as fabulous, if the desires rise to the insight observations the service is viewed as great and if the desires are not met the service will be viewed as awful. For a service to be considered as good the organisation is required for making customers satisfied and service quality should be associated with customer perceptions and expectations. (Carlsson, 2010)

2. Flexibility increase speed of response - being able to give fast service for customers depends on the operation being flexible. Flexible operations speedily transfer extra skilled staff and equipment to the urgent conditions and emergencies will provide the service

This interaction in the service encounter has an effect on the quality of service being offered for example where customer are waiting in a queue to collect airline tickets and customer ‘C’ decides to jump the queue. This will result in customer ‘A” and or ‘B’ complaining and perceiving poor service offering as there is no measure to safe guard an uninterrupted service consumption.\

Secondly, dependability. Dependability means reliability, that is, how the company are performing and completing their promised service, quality and accuracy within the given set requirements between the company and the customer. Dependability is just as important as a goof first hand impression, because every customer want to know if their supplier is reliable and fulfill the set requirements with satisfaction. Dependability is just as important as the first hand impression, because every customer wants to know that their supplier of what it may be are reliable and give the service agreed including great quality within the given timeframe without compromising on the quality. Dependability includes three elements, which are consistent order cycles, safe delivery and complete delivery. First of all, we talk about consistent order cycles.

Sureshchandra, Rajendran and Anantharaman (2002) identified five critical aspects of service quality from the customers point of view namely core service/service product, human element of service delivery, systematisation of service delivery, tangibles of service and lastly social responsibility in order to conceptualise service quality. Table 1 will further provide an explanation to the five critical aspects of service quality as outlined by Sureshchandra et al (2002).